Life at Facebook exposed!... Staff monitored by 'KGB-like' police......Zuckerberg hostile emails...
EXCLUSIVE: ‘I trusted you to
create art and what you f***ing did was vandalize!' Mark Zuckerberg’s hostile
emails…Sheryl Sandberg’s 'only good news' room… Dress codes (no booty shorts)
for women. Life at Facebook exposed!
·
FIRED Facebook advertising manager Antonia
Garcia Martinez has written a tell-all book about his time at the social
network
·
Zuckerberg fired off angry email after he
asked staff to paint the walls and the place was covered with obscene drawings
·
When one employee leaked details
about a new product launch Zuckerberg sent a chilling email to every worker.
Subject: ‘Please resign!’
·
Staff who stepped out of line
were monitored by a 'KGB-like' internal police force called ‘The Sec'
·
'F*** with Facebook and
security guards would be hustling you out the door like a rowdy drunk at a late
night Taco Bell,' Martinez writes
·
He claims female employees had a
strict dress code so as not to distract men - who had no code at all
·
The day that an employee joined
Facebook is called their ‘Faceversary’ and is marked by celebrations akin to
Baptisms
Facebook
has long been accused of being a sexist workplace and letting founder Mark
Zuckerberg rule with an iron fist in a velvet perk-filled glove.
But as
far as one ex-employee is concerned, the glove is now definitely off.
Antonia
Garcia Martinez, a former Facebook advertising manager who was fired two
years ago, claims that working at the social network was like being in a cult
akin to North Korea with Zuckerberg its unquestioned leader.
Female
employees were told not to wear clothing that might be ‘distracting’ to male
workers,
Human
resource managers gave a speech during initiation for new employees in which
they told women that there was a dress code which they had to stick to.
They also
pulled women aside and ‘read them the riot act’ if their skirts were too short.
Men do
not appear to have been given the same treatment according to Martinez' new
tell-all book, ‘Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune
and Random Failure in Silicon Valley’, published by Harper
Collins
Martinez
takes the title from a term used in the tech world for a tool used by computer
developers to identify problems before they crop up.
But for
Martinez, there were problems aplenty at Facebook, not least the KGB-like
internal police force called ‘The Sec’ which monitored everything that staff
did.
Facebook
has long faced allegations its workplace culture is sexist and still mirrors
the Frat House style environment that harks back to social media's early days.
Facemash,
for example, was a crude ‘hot or not’ style game that went viral in Harvard,
where Zuckerberg studied.
Since
then former employees have claimed that little has changed and that it is more
like Mad Men when it comes to equal rights.
Martinez,
who was sacked by Facebook in 2013 after two years working on targeted
advertisements, describes how new employees went through a series of talks to
induct them into the company’s way of thinking.
The
author recalls being told by Chamath Palihapitiya, one of the stars of
Facebook: ‘Look, we’re not here to f*** around. You’re at Facebook now and
we’ve got lots to do’.
After 20
minutes more of lecturing he finished off with another missive: ‘Just f*****g
do it’.
But
'doing it' had its limits.
Martinez
says that Facebook's Human Resources told them that the policy on asking
co-workers out was that you got one try and if they said no you had to leave
it.
‘Next was
a warning to the womenfolk,' writes the author.
‘Our male
HR authority, with occasional backup from his female counterpart, launched into
a speech about avoiding clothing that ‘distracted’ coworkers.
‘I’d
later learn that manager did in fact pull aside female employees and read them
the riot act. One such example happened in (advertising) when an intern who
looked about 16 coming in regularly in booty shorts.’
Such
attitudes toward women got senior staff into trouble with Sheryl Sandberg, the
chief operating officer at Facebook and one of the few female boardroom
executives.
On one
occasion, she was evaluating a presentation of a new tool that used pictures of
cats instead of users’ pictures.
When
Sandberg asked why they were all cats, the product manager Dan Rubenstein said:
‘Well, you know, kittens and cats are like pu…’
Sandberg
did not need to hear the word ‘pussy’ and replied: ‘Got it!’ followed by a
sharp intake of breath,
She said:
‘If there were women on that team they’d NEVER EVER choose those photos as demo
pics. I think you should change them immediately’.
Rubenstein
duly scribbled in his notepad: ‘CHANGE PUSSY PHOTOS NOW!’
Martinez,
a former Goldman Sachs trader who had an on-off relationship with the mother of
his three children, has his own chauvinistic issues.
He
writes: ‘Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive
despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of s**t.
‘They
have their self-regarding entitlement feminism and ceaselessly vaunt their
independence but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion,
they'd become precisely the sort of useless baggage you'd trade for a box of
shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel’.
Martinez
admits that he once tried to have sex in a closet on the Facebook campus after
getting drunk in the bar on site called ‘Shady Lady’.
He admits
that he had his ‘fair share of scares’ with women nearly getting pregnant after
having unprotected sex with many women.
Martinez
writes: ‘I was on season four of the show where a tear-filled woman X shows up
two weeks after the shag saying she had ‘missed her period’ (sort of in the
same way I'd say I ‘missed my bus’).
‘Nothing
had ever come of it and after the third showing you just wanted to say: ‘Look,
woman, unless you've got a screaming infant in your arms and it looks like me,
we have nothing to talk about’.
In
another passage about his pre-Facebook says Martinez says that trying to
attract venture capital funding with an ongoing lawsuit against was like
‘walking into a singles bar with a T-shirt announcing: ‘I’m HIV positive’’.
Martinez
says that working for Facebook is like being in a cult with Zuckerberg as its
leader who is followed by ‘true believers’ who have a Messianic zeal to get
everyone in the world onto the social network.
The day
that an employee joined Facebook is called their ‘Faceversary’ and is marked by
celebrations akin to how Christians celebrate the day they are baptized.
It was
essentially treated as a second birthday and everyone would congratulate you and
give you balloons.
The day
people leave Facebook is considered their ‘death’ and they would post a picture
of their battered ID card as their Facebook profile to show they were going out
the door.
In
Facebook’s first office, one conference room was called Ping and the one next
door was called Pong.
When
Facebook moved to its sprawling campus in Menlo Park signs were put up which
read: ‘Our work is never done’, ‘Embracing change isn’t enough’, ‘Make it
faster’, The journey 1% finished’ and ‘What would you do if you weren’t
afraid?’
Zuckerberg’s
office became known as ‘The Aquarium’ because of its all glass walls while
Sandberg’s conference room became dubbed ‘Only Good News’, apparently because
that is all she wanted to hear.
Staff
were expected to work 20 hour plus days, Martinez claims, and eat all their
meals at the cafeteria, which developed to cater for breakfast, lunch and
dinner.
Not every
initiative was a success though and when Zuckerberg asked staff to paint the
walls of their new office he was furious because after two days the place was
covered with obscene drawings.
Martinez
says the gist of the email Zuckerberg sent round to staff was that ‘I trusted
you to create art and what you f*****g did was vandalize the place’.
According
to Martinez Zuckerberg was obsessed with secrecy. When one employee leaked
details about a new product launch Zuckerberg responded by sending a chilling
email round to every single worker with the subject line: ‘Please resign’.
The email
was designed to cause alarm to anyone who received it - in this case the whole
company.
Zuckerberg
was so angry at the employee who leaked details about the new product that he
'excoriated' the individual in the message - attacking the person for his
or her 'base moral nature' and how he/she had 'betrayed the team'.
The book
says: 'The moral to this story, a parable of a prodigal son but with an
unforgiving father, was clear: F*** with Facebook and security guards would be
hustling you out the door like a rowdy drunk at a late night Taco Bell'.
In his
few personal dealings with Zuckerberg, Martinez found him to be blunt and once
interrupted his response to say: 'Why don't you just answer the question'.
He said
that during a meeting about targeted advertising Zuckerberg did not review the
technical details because he 'wouldn't have had the patience' to go through it.
Zuckerberg
made decisions that affected Facebook's 1.6 billion users based on 'gut feel'
and 'whatever historical politics were at play' rather than a considered
judgement, Martinez claims.
Martinez
is also brutal in his assessment of Facebook’s ability to make money off
advertising before 2013 and said its ability to monetize its data was ‘utter
dog s***’ and that they were clueless.'
A lot of
the change appears to be the work of Sandberg, who arrived in 2008 having
previously been at Google and been mentored by former Federal Reserve chairman
Larry Summers while studying at Harvard.
She
instituted what Martinez calls the ‘Supreme Court of Sheryl’, or a system for
improving targeted advertising that she controlled.
The book
says: ‘She clearly knew her boss inside and out. Here was a boss who excelled
in the role of gatekeeper and shepherd to difficult and powerful men, whether
that role was chief of staff for prickly US Treasury Secretary Larry Summer, or
COO of and for Zuck’.
One of
Sandberg’s tricks for hiring the right staff was to make them think they were
missing an unmissable opportunity.
A
colleague told Martinez: ‘She basically convinced me by saying: ‘Look, I either
hire you now and you come work for Facebook, or a year from now I’ll hire you
to work for the guy whose job I’m offering to you right now’. And that’s what
convinced me’.
Martinez
reveals how Zuckerberg declared ‘total war’ on Google in 2011 when it launched
Google Plus, its ill-fated rival social network.
Martinez
claims that this hit Zuckerberg like a ‘bomb’ and that he put the entire
company on Lockdown, meaning that they were not able to leave the building.
In a
speech in front of the entire company Zuckerberg quoted Cato the Elder, one of
his favourite philosophers, and told that Carthage must be destroyed, referring
to Google.
According
to Martinez: ‘Everyone walked out of there ready to invade Poland if need be’
When it
became clear that Google had been inflating the figures for how many people
were using Google Plus and it was not a threat.
Martinez
is not the first former Facebook employee to highlight its workplace culture.
In ‘The
Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network’ Katherine Loose
claimed that it was deeply sexist and stuck in a 1950s mentality.
She wrote
that female workers at the social network were propositioned for threesomes or
given crude insults like ‘I want to put my teeth in your a**’.
Lower
ranking employees who were invariably female were banned from a conference
unless they worked as coat checkers whilst there.
In the
book she compared Zuckerberg to Napoleon and branded a ‘little emperor’ who
created a company where his staff could ‘idol worship’ him.
Loose was
employee no.51 and worked her way up from customer relations to a senior
marketing role before becoming the speechwriter for Zuckerberg.
Facebook
declined to comment about Martinez' book when Daily Mail Online reached out.
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